Elayne Rosgaard POV
The city should not have been this white.
Elayne Rosgaard stood at the highest window of the Northern Academy's main tower and watched her breath smoke against the glass. The panes had frosted over from the inside, lace patterns spidering across wards that were not designed to hold back this kind of cold.
Beyond, roofs sagged under fresh snow. Chimneys spat more smoke than usual. The central square was a smear of gray cloaks and white ground, people hurrying with their heads down like they were trying to walk between the flakes.
It was early autumn.
The Eternal Winter lay hundreds of leagues to the north, where it had brooded since before Elayne was born. Its boundary was a scar on every map, a jagged line that did not move. This was south of that line. Far south.
One of the wards in the glass finally cracked with a soft, tired pop. Frost crept into the gap in a heartbeat.
"Charming," Elayne murmured.
The frost pattern wasn't random. It branched, then branched again, thin lines of ice reaching down towards the stone lip of the window. When they met the silver inlay of her protection circle, they stopped, hissed, and retreated a finger's width.
Not natural cold, then.
A distant bell tolled once. The Academy's way of saying: the Council wants you. Now.
"Of course it does," she said, and turned away from the window.
The war room below had been warm when they built it.
Someone had cast permanent heat runes in the ceiling centuries ago, back when the Eternal Winter first stopped advancing and everyone thought they had time to be comfortable. Today, the runes fought a losing battle against the creeping cold. Breath smoked here too. Someone had put braziers in the corners, as if insulted magic could be fixed with more firewood.
Three people waited at the circular table.
High Priestess Liora Aurelienne stood nearest the door, not because it was strategic, but because it let her see the whole room at once. She had the kind of beauty that made tailors rich and apprentices stumble: pale hair braided back in a crown, features too precise to be called soft. Her layered white and gold robes fell in clean lines; even the way her stole lay across her shoulders looked deliberate.
As Elayne entered, Liora's fingers flicked out almost absently to nudge a candlestick on the table a thumb's width to the left, lining it up with the map's edge. Only then did she clasp her hands like a proper holy woman.
The holy sigil she wore—an eight-petaled radiant bloom—hung from her neck in polished mother-of-pearl. It did not fog, even when she sighed.
Sir Darius Valek was a silhouette of steel and discipline at the far side of the table, helm on the surface in front of him, dark hair pulled back. The pauldron of his left shoulder bore the same bloom as Liora's pendant, embossed over radiant rays. His knuckles were white on the rim of the table.
Knight-Captain Brynjar Kaelros occupied the space between them, the only one not pretending this was a polite meeting. His cloak was still damp with old snow, sword unbuckled but near enough to touch. He nodded when she entered, short and respectful; a soldier acknowledging a commander.
The only thing on the table was a map.
It was the latest topographical chart of the northern kingdoms and the lands below, inked on cured beast-hide so it wouldn't warp in damp. Rivers, trade roads, mountain ranges. A faint, dark line high up where the scribe had written in neat anxiety: ETERNAL WINTER BOUNDARY – DO NOT CROSS.
Thin threads of pale blue light crawled across the hide, not part of any ink.
"Archmage," Brynjar said. "You see what the diviners found?"
Elayne stepped up to the map. The air over it was colder than the rest of the room, like someone had left a window open above the hide and forgotten to close it.
The blue lines were not rivers. They ignored hills, valleys, borders. They crawled along directions that people didn't map: leylines, fault-lines, places where magic liked to gather in slow underground pools.
One of them pulsed at the edge of the Eternal Winter, then pushed south another sliver. The hide crinkled softly.
"We've checked the measurements thrice," Liora said. Her temple-trained voice could make a hymn sound like a verdict. "If this were a trick, I'd have excommunicated the artist by now."
Elayne glanced up at her. "Ugly, is it?"
"The main temple woke rimed in ice," Liora said. "The courtyard fountain froze wrong—bulges, seams, one of the marble faces twisted sideways. The First Sculptor now squints like a drunk. The lower roses shattered. Someone is carving at the world without knowing how to hold a chisel." Her mouth thinned. "It is vandalism. Against beauty itself."
Of course the priestess of a beauty-obsessed faith would frame it that way. Elayne let herself smile, just a little.
"Vandalism, war, same tools," she said. "Different audience."
Sir Darius shifted his weight, metal whispering.
"Temple gardens aren't the only concern," he said. "Frostbridge reports the river frozen solid from bed to surface. No current. Deer on the banks stiff as stone, no snow around them. The cold hits like a wall and keeps moving."
Brynjar unrolled a smaller strip of parchment and slid it across the table.
"Western passes say the same," he added. "Hunter lodges, waystations, places that don't usually see this kind of frost for another two months. If the rivers and roads lock up now, we start bleeding grain before winter properly arrives."
Liora's eyes flicked to his damp cloak and scuffed boots. She didn't argue. Hunger was ugly too.
Elayne watched the pulsing lines. They thickened at certain points, dimmed at others, like veins in some enormous diagram.
"This edge hasn't moved in a century," she said, tracing the printed boundary of Eternal Winter without touching the hide. "It howled, froze, then stopped. We built around it. We learned where it was safe to live."
Her finger drifted down to where one of the blue lines split and curled.
"And now," she went on, "we have ice threading through fountains and hunting trails two hundred leagues south, riding leylines like roots."
"A disease," Darius said.
"A bad imitation," Liora corrected. "My patron would never waste power on something this clumsy. Someone else is tugging at the canvas and smearing everything out of proportion."
Elayne extended her hand over the map, thumb and forefinger closing as if pinching something between them. The air prickled. Sigils inked into her skin under her sleeves stirred, humming like distant bees.
"Let's see it breathe," she murmured.
The blue lines brightened and began to move faster.
They did not swirl, like storms. They did not ripple, like wind across water. They crawled, thickening along a few key channels, hollowing others out. At three points on the map, they pooled into brighter nodes—little blooming frost-flowers of light.
One at the established rim of the Eternal Winter.
One far to the west, in sparsely inhabited hills.
One much farther south than any sane winter should reach, in territory labeled only with a few trade roads and the hint of cavern systems under the ink: UNDERDEEP ROUTES – E'NATHYR REGION.
The light at that southern node flickered oddly, like it couldn't decide whether to be on the surface or below.
Elayne waited until the glow began to dim and the room's damp heat asserted itself over the map.
"These aren't weather fronts," she said. "Storms don't care about leylines. This is something anchoring itself along the bones of the world and pulling heat out, piece by piece."
"Then we cut out the anchors," Darius said at once. His hand went to the bloom on his chest. "Name them, and send me. Our light will burn this rot away."
Liora's approval showed in the slight lift of her chin. "A cleansing would be fitting," she said. "Quiet, precise, and leaving the world better-looking than we found it."
Brynjar shook his head.
"If we start shouting for holy war, every lord between here and the south will slam their gates," he said. "We don't know if this is a cursed scar flaring up or some mage pulling at old wounds. We need eyes, not banners."
Elayne considered him. Considered the map. The Eternal Winter had been a rumor when she was an apprentice, a story older mages used to frighten students into respecting power. She'd seen it once from afar—a horizon of white that did not end.
They had learned to live beside that scar. Catalogued it. Measured it. Trusted it to stay where it was.
This new cold was not trustworthy.
"I agree with the Knight-Captain," she said.
Liora and Darius both turned toward her. Surprise flickered on Liora's face; Darius's jaw tightened.
"I won't call a holy march on a pattern," Elayne said. "That's how you slaughter bystanders while the real spellwork slides away. We send an expedition—small enough not to start rumors, strong enough not to die at the first frost."
She tapped each of the frost-flowers of light in turn.
"The first node sits where the Eternal Winter's edge always has," she said. "We know that one. We leave it for now. If it starts moving, I will reconsider everything."
Her finger moved to the western hills.
"The second is in land we can reach without crossing anyone's pride," she said. "Brynjar?"
"We can have a company there in a week," he answered. "Two, if the roads ice worse. I'll need authority to take local guides and food."
"You'll have it." She shifted her hand south. The light on the hide shivered under her skin. "The third is worse. It's south, and half in the Underdeep besides. Near E'nathyr's routes."
Darius frowned.
"The mushroom city," he said. "With the spore storms."
"And the stories about undead and some tasteless tower," Liora added, with a delicate shudder. "As if the architecture down there weren't offensive enough already."
"Stories," Elayne said. "But enough of them that I'd like to look myself, rather than rely on frightened merchants. If someone is rewriting the rules of winter in already-broken lands, I'd like to read their script before it reaches our doorstep."
She straightened.
"I'll lead the southern investigation myself," she said. "The Frosted Rose Expedition."
Brynjar nodded once, as if he'd been waiting for that. Darius bowed from the waist, short and sharp.
"Then I am your sword," he said. "Where you go, my order goes."
Liora tilted her head just enough for the mother-of-pearl bloom at her throat to catch the brazier-light.
"My patron doesn't abandon favored compositions," she said. "If someone is trying to redraw this land in ugliness, I won't sit in the gallery and watch."
Elayne allowed herself a proper smile.
"Good. I prefer my expeditions with working wards and mobile moral outrage."
Brynjar huffed, which was as close as he came to laughing in uniform.
"I'll pull veterans from the border garrisons," he said. "Soldiers who've seen snow and don't faint when priests glare. We ride light, pack more wards and rations than steel. If this is spellwork, swords won't fix it."
"Steel fixes mages if you get close enough," Darius muttered, but it was more habit than argument.
Elayne patted the map's southern edge.
"Let's avoid testing that on whoever carved this pattern, if we can," she said. "I'd rather talk first. If they're reasonable, we negotiate. If not, we can always fall back on burning things."
That earned her a shared look from Darius and Liora. Different reasons. Same solution.
She turned away from the table.
"Three days," she said. "Knight-Captain, have your people ready. High Priestess, whatever rites you need to keep your bones intact where the air bites harder than pride. Sir Darius, pick paladins who can follow orders, not just omens."
"And you, Archmage?" Liora asked.
Elayne glanced back at the window slit. Frost was already eating at the warded glass again, patterns branching and failing, branching and failing.
"I'll be reading," she said. "And writing a few new wards. If something is pulling winter south along our leylines, I want to see how it reacts when the lines… push back."
She laid her hand flat over the southern frost-flower once more.
The blue light pulsed under her palm. Not in answer, not yet, but in acknowledgment. The way a distant presence might blink when someone finally looked straight at it.
"Three days," she repeated softly.
The cold on her skin felt like a promise.